Suez Canal

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 23rd of March 2021, the Suez Canal, a 193.30 kilometre waterway through Egypt, was blocked in both directions by a single ship. The container ship Ever Given, operated by Evergreen Marine, was sailing from Malaysia to the Netherlands. Strong winds allegedly blew it off course. It ran aground, swung sideways, and sealed the channel completely. Economists and trade experts quickly began to warn about the cost. The International Chamber of Shipping offered one yardstick: up to 3 billion dollars worth of cargo passes through the canal every day. Yet this is an artificial, sea-level channel that joins the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea and divides Africa from Asia. Its idea is far older than any container ship. Who first tried to cut a passage through this desert isthmus, and why did so many attempts fail? Why did the greatest sea power of the nineteenth century try to stop it? And what happens to two seas when a channel finally joins them?

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• 2. Pharaohs and Silt

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  Aristotle, writing in his Meteorology, recorded a story about the earliest known attempt. One of the Egyptian kings, he said, tried to dig a canal, but "he found that the sea was higher than the land." Aristotle named Sesostris, a legendary king likely to be either Senusret II or Senusret III of the Twelfth Dynasty. Other traditions credit Ramesses II with a smaller canal. These early channels ran from the Nile toward the Red Sea through a dry valley called Wadi Tumilat, and they were navigable only in the flood season.

  The pharaoh Necho II, who reigned from 610 to 595 BCE, started a larger canal between Bubastis and Heroopolis. Herodotus was told that 120,000 men perished in the work, a figure the source calls doubtless exaggerated. Herodotus also reported that an oracle warned Necho that others would benefit from his success, and the work stopped. A war with Nebuchadnezzar II most probably interrupted it as well.

  Darius I of Persia, who ruled Egypt after Cambyses II conquered it, finished the job. Perhaps a natural passage near the town of Shaluf had silted up, and Darius had to clear it. According to Herodotus, the channel was wide enough for two triremes to pass with their oars extended, and the trip took four days. Darius set up granite stelae to mark the achievement, including one near Kabret. One inscription has him declare: "I am a Persian; setting out from Persia I conquered Egypt."

  A pillar at Pithom records that in 270 or 269 BCE Ptolemy II Philadelphus reopened the canal. At Arsinoe he built a navigable lock with sluices, so ships could pass without letting Red Sea salt water into the fresh water of the canal. Pliny the Elder described his trench as 100 feet wide and 30 feet deep.

  Time was against every one of these canals. Some historians think the Red Sea slowly receded southward, away from Lake Timsah and the Great Bitter Lake. Nile silt kept piling up too. By 31 BCE, Cleopatra appears to have had no usable waterway. Fleeing Octavian, she tried to drag her ships across the isthmus to the Red Sea, and according to Plutarch the Arabs of Petra burned the first of them.

  The emperor Trajan re-excavated the channel in the first century AD and named it Amnis Traianus after himself. After the Arab conquest in 641 AD, Amr ibn al-As ordered it restored to improve links between Egypt and Medina. The Abbasid caliph al-Mansur is said to have closed it in 767, to starve his enemies of supplies. The Fatimid caliph al-Hakim repaired it around the year 1000, but it soon became choked with sand. A surviving stretch near the Nile, the Khalij, kept serving Cairo's water system until the 19th century.

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• 3. Dreams Without Water

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  In 1488, Bartolomeu Dias sailed around southern Africa and opened a sea route to India and the Spice Islands. Venice, once the great spice-trading centre, lost its role as middleman almost overnight. Desperate Venetian leaders thought about digging a waterway between the Red Sea and the Nile to bring the luxury trade back to their doors. They even negotiated with Egypt's ruling Mamelukes. Then the Ottoman Sultan Selim I conquered Egypt in 1517, and the plan died.

  The Ottoman Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha tried next, in the 16th century. He wanted to connect Constantinople to the pilgrimage and trade routes of the Indian Ocean, and to let the Ottoman navy join its Red Sea, Black Sea and Mediterranean fleets. European ships were growing more common in the Indian Ocean, which made the idea urgent. The cost, however, was judged too high, and nothing was finished.

  Napoleon arrived in Egypt in late 1798, and he asked for the remains of an ancient waterway to be found. Archaeologists, scientists, cartographers and engineers searched northern Egypt. In 1799 they found traces of an old canal running through Bubastis, Pi-Ramesses and Pithom. Their maps appeared in the Description de l'Égypte. After Napoleon became Emperor of France in 1804, he considered a new north-south canal that would avoid the silty Nile. He dropped the plan because of a mistaken belief that the Red Sea stood 8.5 metres higher than the Mediterranean. That belief came from fragmentary survey measurements taken during the war, and it implied costly locks.

  The error lingered for decades. In 1830, General Francis Chesney told the British government there was no difference in elevation and that a canal was feasible, but his report got little attention. Lieutenant Waghorn meanwhile set up an "Overland Route" carrying post and passengers to India through Egypt. Its value showed in 1857, when 5,000 British troops crossed Egypt to deal with the Indian Rebellion.

  The French explorer Linant de Bellefonds became chief engineer of Egypt's Public Works and surveyed the isthmus in his spare time. In 1833, the Saint-Simonian Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin tried to interest Muhammad Ali in a canal and failed. Three years later, the Italian-Austrian railway pioneer Alois Negrelli took up the idea. In 1846, Enfantin's Société d'Études du Canal de Suez invited experts including Robert Stephenson, Negrelli and Paul-Adrien Bourdaloue. Bourdaloue's survey of the isthmus was the first generally accepted proof that the two seas stood at practically the same level.

  Britain was unmoved. It feared that a canal open to everyone might interfere with its India trade, and it preferred a railway from Alexandria through Cairo to Suez, which Stephenson eventually built. The canal would need someone with a gift for persuasion, and a French diplomat who had befriended an Egyptian prince in the 1830s was waiting.

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• 4. Lesseps's Bargain

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  In 1854 and 1856, Ferdinand de Lesseps obtained concessions from Sa'id Pasha, the Khedive of Egypt and Sudan, to form a company that would build a canal open to ships of all nations. The company would run it for 99 years from its opening. De Lesseps got these terms through the friendship he had built with Sa'id as a French diplomat in the 1830s. He then convened an International Commission of 13 experts from seven countries, among them John Robinson McClean and Negrelli again. In December 1856 the commission delivered a unanimous report with plans and profiles. On the 15th of December 1858, the Suez Canal Company came into being.

  Lord Palmerston, the project's most unwavering foe, admitted in the mid-1850s why he opposed it. A route open to all nations would overturn Britain's commercial and maritime relations and end its exclusive advantages. Britain also attacked the use of forced labour, and for a time the viceroy condemned the corvée and halted the work. Investors abroad were doubtful too. Britain, Austria and Russia bought few shares. With help from the Cattaui banking family and their ties to James de Rothschild, bonds and shares were promoted successfully in France, and all the French shares sold quickly. A British skeptic predicted the canal "will never become a large ship's accessible way in any case."

  Work began on the shore of the future Port Said on the 25th of April 1859. The digging took roughly ten years, and the corvée supplied labour until 1864. Some sources say over 30,000 people were working at any given time and more than 1.5 million were employed in all. Many labourers died, often from cholera and similar epidemics. The toll is hotly disputed. Gamal Abdel Nasser cited 120,000 deaths in a speech on the 26th of July 1956. The company's chief medical officer reported no more than 2.49 deaths per thousand in 1866. Scaling that rate generously gives fewer than 3,000 deaths, and the limited recorded data point to fewer than 1,000.

  The company also built towns along the route. Ismailia rose near Lake Timsah, Port Tewfik at the southern entrance, and Port Said in the north, followed by Port Fuad in 1925. Housing was segregated by race or nationality.

  The opening ceremonies began on the evening of the 15th of November 1869 with illuminations, fireworks and a banquet on the Khedive Isma'il's yacht. Guests included Emperor Franz Joseph I and the French Empress Eugenie aboard the yacht L'Aigle. A temporary mosque and church stood side by side on the beach for blessings. On the morning of the 17th, the procession of ships entered the canal behind L'Aigle.

  The first day ended in trouble. The French ship Péluse grounded at the entrance to Lake Timsah, and its hawser blocked the way in. Following ships had to anchor in the canal until the next morning. HMS Newport, captained by George Nares, slipped around it after Nares sent out a boat to take soundings. Doubts had already been raised that the channel was as deep as promised. The final cost came to more than double the original estimate, and the S.S. Dido became the first ship to pass from south to north.

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• 5. Empire's Shortcut

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  The company was in financial difficulties after the opening, and the last works finished only in 1871. Traffic fell below expectations for the first two years. De Lesseps tried to raise revenue by reading the contract's net ton as a ship's cargo capacity. The dispute ended in the International Commission of Constantinople's protocol of the 18th of December 1873. It set the Suez Canal Net Tonnage, which is still used with the Suez Canal Special Tonnage Certificate today.

  The canal changed world trade at once. Combined with the American transcontinental railroad finished six months earlier, it let the world be circled in record time. It also fed European colonization of Africa. It even contributed to the Panic of 1873 in Great Britain, because goods from the Far East had been carried around the Cape of Good Hope in sailing vessels and stored in British warehouses.

  In 1875, Isma'il Pasha could not pay his bank debts. He sold his 44% share in the canal to the government of the United Kingdom for 4,000,000 pounds, or 19.2 million dollars. French shareholders still held the majority. Local unrest then led Britain to invade Egypt in 1882 and take full control, though Egypt nominally stayed part of the Ottoman Empire. Evelyn Baring, the 1st Earl of Cromer, served as British representative from 1883 to 1907. He reorganized the government and suppressed rebellions and corruption, which helped traffic grow.

  The Mediterranean did best. Trade between Asia and the south of Europe was now far quicker than for Britain, the Netherlands or Germany. A steamship trip to Bombay from Trieste or Brindisi saved 37 days. From London or Hamburg the saving was 24 days. Austria-Hungary, which had helped plan and build the canal, gained the most. Its largest shipping line, Österreichischer Lloyd, expanded rapidly, and so did the port of Trieste. Pasquale Revoltella, a co-founder of the Lloyd, was vice-president of the canal company.

  In 1900, the company held a dredging trial. The Queensland Government's ship The Hercules was tested on granite and limestone deposits but was not chosen, and it returned to Brisbane in January 1901.

  The Convention of Constantinople in 1888 declared the canal a neutral zone under British protection. The British defended it against a major Ottoman attack in 1915, during the First World War. The Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 left the United Kingdom in control. In the Second World War, Italo-German attempts to capture it were repulsed during the North Africa Campaign, and it stayed closed to Axis shipping. Afterwards, Britain kept a garrison of some 70,000 troops in the Canal Zone. Egypt would soon demand them out.

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• 6. Nasser's Canal

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  In 1951, Egypt repudiated the 1936 treaty, and in October 1954 the United Kingdom tentatively agreed to remove its troops. Then Egypt's overtures toward the Soviet Union led Britain and the United States to withdraw their pledge to fund the Aswan Dam. President Gamal Abdel Nasser answered on the 26th of July 1956 by nationalising the canal, planning to pay for the dam from its revenue. The same day he closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships.

  The Suez Crisis followed. Under a pre-agreed plan called the Protocol of Sèvres, Israel invaded the Sinai on the 29th of October. That let the British and French declare the fighting a threat to regional stability and step in, officially to separate the two sides but in reality to regain the canal and topple Nasser. Canada's Lester B. Pearson, hoping to save the British from what he saw as a disastrous action, proposed the first United Nations peacekeeping force. On the 4th of November 1956, a majority at the United Nations voted for his resolution. The United States added pressure by selling sterling, which would depreciate. The UK called a ceasefire and agreed to withdraw. Pearson later won the Nobel Peace Prize. Ships sunk on Nasser's orders closed the canal from November 1956 to April 1957, when it was cleared with UN help.

  After the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Egypt had barred Israeli shipping despite UN Security Council resolutions urging otherwise. On the 16th of May 1967, Nasser ordered UN peacekeepers out of Sinai. After the Six-Day War began on the 5th of June 1967, Egypt blockaded the canal to all shipping, and Israeli forces took the entire east bank. Nobody had expected a long closure, so fifteen cargo ships, known as the "Yellow Fleet", were trapped in the canal. They stayed there until the reopening in 1975. The War of Attrition ran from 1967 until August 1970 and ended after Nasser died on the 28th of September 1970.

  On the 6th of October 1973, the Yom Kippur War opened with Operation Badr, in which the Egyptian army crossed into the Sinai. Wreckage from that conflict is still visible along the banks. On the 22nd of October, Israeli forces counter-attacked by crossing the canal toward Suez City. A withdrawal from the west side followed in the Sinai I agreement of the 18th of January 1974.

  Clearing the waterway took two years. The United States launched Operation Nimbus Moon, with the USS Inchon carrying 12 RH-53D minesweeping helicopters. Britain's Royal Navy ran Operation Rheostat with minehunters including HMS Maxton, HMS Bossington and HMS Wilton. Afterwards the canal and its lakes were considered 99% clear of mines. On the 5th of June 1975, exactly eight years after it closed, President Anwar Sadat led the first northbound convoy to Port Said aboard an Egyptian destroyer. Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi stood at his side.

  The UN force's mandate expired in 1979, when a Soviet veto at Syria's request blocked an extension. A new Multinational Force and Observers arrived in the Sinai in 1981, and it remains active today.

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• 7. Convoy Clockwork

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  At 03:30 each day, a southbound convoy leaves Port Said. Half an hour later, at 04:00, a northbound convoy departs Suez. The canal has no locks, because the terrain is flat and the small sea-level difference between its ends is inconsequential. Ships move through at around 8 knots, a speed that keeps wakes from eroding the banks. The passage takes 11 to 16 hours. Today the canal is 193.30 kilometres long, 24 metres deep and 205 metres wide, compared with 164 kilometres and 8 metres deep when built.

  Its size sets it apart. The canal can handle larger ships than the Panama Canal, and its limit is called Suezmax. Some supertankers are too big, so they offload part of their cargo to a canal-owned ship and reload on the other side. About 8% of world sea trade passes through. In 2008-21,415 vessels transited and receipts totalled 5.381 billion dollars. By 1955, two-thirds of Europe's oil already used it.

  For most of its history the canal was a single lane with passing places. Before 2015, ships had to pass in convoys and use bypasses that covered 78 kilometres of its length. In 2014, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi ordered the Ballah Bypass widened from 61 to 312 metres for 35 kilometres. The project cost more than 59.4 billion Egyptian pounds, about 9 billion dollars, and was financed by interest-bearing investment certificates sold only to Egyptians. Sisi opened it on the 6th of August 2015. Ships can now pass in both directions in the central section.

  Bridges and tunnels cross it too. The Suez Canal Bridge at El Qantara, opened in 2001, clears the water by 70 metres and is also called the Egyptian-Japanese Friendship Bridge. The El Ferdan Railway Bridge is the longest swing-span bridge in the world, at 340 metres. Five pontoon bridges, opened between 2016 and 2019, can rotate against the banks to let ships pass.

  The canal has had its own near-misses. In 2004 the oil tanker Tropic Brilliance blocked it for three days. In 2017 the OOCL Japan ran aground for a few hours. After Ever Given was refloated on the 29th of March 2021, traffic resumed within hours, slowly clearing a backlog of around 450 ships. Egypt's canal chairman, Usama Rabie, said the damage could reach about 1 billion dollars. Some maritime experts argued the world had stocks and other suppliers to fall back on. Another vessel, MV Coral Crystal, briefly blocked the canal in September 2021 but was freed in 15 minutes.

  In the fiscal year ending the 30th of June 2023, canal revenue set a record of 9.4 billion dollars. Then Houthi attacks on ships off Yemen cost the canal 800 million dollars a month, according to Sisi. The old Cape route around Africa remains the only alternative for ships too large for the canal, and the melting Arctic is opening a Northern Sea Route in summer. An Iraqi "Dry Canal" road and rail project is now being tested as another rival.

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• 8. Red Sea Invaders

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  In 1863, a small freshwater channel called the Sweet Water Canal was finished from the Nile delta along Wadi Tumilat to the future canal. With branches to Suez and Port Said, it brought water to an arid area, helping canal builders first and then farms and settlements. Later, the Aswan High Dam, which began operating in 1968, sharply reduced freshwater inflow and cut off the nutrient-rich Nile silt that once reached the eastern Mediterranean.

  The canal itself gave the world its first salt-water passage between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. The Red Sea is about 1.2 metres higher than the eastern Mediterranean, yet the current in the middle of the canal flows north in winter and south in summer. The Bitter Lakes were naturally hypersaline, and for many decades that saltiness blocked species from moving north. Once the lakes' salinity equalised with the Red Sea, the barrier fell.

  Traffic across the canal runs mostly one way. The Red Sea is saltier and less rich in nutrients, so its species thrive in the milder eastern Mediterranean. Very few Mediterranean species have settled in the harsher Red Sea. The south-to-north flow is called Lessepsian migration, after Ferdinand de Lesseps, or sometimes the "Erythrean invasion."

  The scale is large. Since the canal was pierced, more than a thousand Red Sea species have been recorded in the Mediterranean, including plankton, seaweeds, invertebrates and fishes. Exotic species from the Indo-Pacific introduced since the 1880s are now a significant part of the Mediterranean ecosystem, and some endanger local and endemic species. A long-term survey commissioned by the Mediterranean Science Commission found that in the first twenty years of this century more exotic fish species arrived from the Indian Ocean than during the entire 20th century.

  The 2015 extension has marine biologists worried that it will speed the arrival of still more Red Sea species. Egypt, meanwhile, is also planning new developments along the shore. The Suez Canal Economic Zone covers over 461 square kilometres in Port Said, Ismailia and Suez, with customs rates cut to zero to attract investment. And in early 2025, two vessels passed through new sections of a second-channel extension in testing, with the Suez Canal Authority reporting no problems.

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